German born Marcus Nispel is one of the true visionaries of the commercial and video music world. Thats why I was surprised to see him directing the remake of 1974s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Pearl Harbor director Michael Bay producing. But after watching New Lines amazing 2-disc DVD set of the movie I got my answer. This remake is a true horror throwback to the 1970s desolate and depressed films. Not just horror movies but the works of Larry Cohen and William Friedkin which dont always have a happy ending.

I would go into plot of the movie but if you dont know it by now then I just feel sorry for you. Jessica Biel and Eric Balfour are two of the people who get caught up at the famous house of horrors and meet up with Leatherface who wields his mighty chainsaw.

When preparing for this interview I discovered many things about Marcus Nispel that I had no idea about. First of all, we owe the trend of piercing thanks to Marcus and the video he directed for George Michael, some of the Broken Lizard guys who created Club Dread were production assistants on a C+C Music Factory video he directed and he is a very spiritual man who follows the teachings of the controversial Indian master Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Daniel Robert Epstein: I just watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and it was pretty scary.

Marcus Nispel: That was our goal.

DRE: A lot of directors start out doing horror films. What made you think doing a remake of such a popular horror film was a good idea?

MN: I didnt think that much about it. I came a little innocent to the whole party because I grew up in Germany and the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was outlawed there. So it wasnt part of my DNA but was definitely a cinematic gap in my education. Therefore I never approached it with the proper respect [laughs]. It wasnt until I signed on that I realized how much it is part of American culture and what an important torch I was carrying.

DRE: I know at one point you were supposed to direct the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie End of Days [released in 1999]. When that didnt happen I thought we would see a film from you soon after that. Why did you wait?

MN: End of Days was a disenchanting process. I thought life was too short to engage in that again so soon. With the Schwarzenegger movie and a lot of other movies I got offered around that time I thought it was a blessing to get offered movies with budgets of $100 million before Ive done any movies. It seemed like a blessing but it ended up as a curse. With these $100 million projects you couldnt do anything with that money, while here is a movie [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre] with a $5 million shooting budget and I could do anything. This is why I jumped on it. I could prove to everybody that with no money and a little bit of inventiveness there is a lot you could do.

DRE: The movie looks like it had a budget of $30 million. I was surprised to find out the budget was so low.

MN: Thank you. Especially in this genre you dont really need all that money to make a movie that delivers what it promises.

DRE: What was the point of making the movie look so good? Because certainly the original film does not.

MN: Daniel Pearl was the cinematographer on the new version and was also the cinematographer on the original as well as being a longtime friend of mine. It was coincidental but he told me all these war stories so it sounded like a fun idea to do the movie. He wanted to be the first DP to do the same movie twice. One of the reasons I gravitated towards the project was that I wanted to deconstruct and make it look distinct. My guy inclination was to make it look like a snuff film in the vein of the first one. Daniel was the guy who talked me out of it. He said that we dont want to make a replica and that generation had The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and this generation had The Blair Witch Project. You can do that gimmick only once per decade. At the time there were a couple of examples where I looked at pretty atrocious things in real life and I realized there can be a extreme poetry in violence. That fascinated me. It doesnt have to look like a documentary. I tried to put poetry in every death scene, one looked like a crucifixion and another one someone gets killed and its not a coincidence that he wears a down jacket so it makes one of the most gruesome scenes look like a winter wonderland. I havent seen anything like that before.

DRE: Why do many music video directors jump into something like a sequel or a remake? For example David Finchers first film was an Alien sequel. Is that the easiest thing to get?

MN: It seems right now it is. This year at the Oscars they had a hard time putting up an Oscar for best original screenplay because everything is based on something else. Its frustrating. After many years of me not wanting to make a movie I was working on a project that was a Femme Nikita type story set in the Cold War. There was nothing much original about it except that a woman was the main character. After four months of working on it the producer comes to me and says I had an epiphany last night. Lets make it about a male. I told him that he just took the only thing out of the movie that made it original. The guy pulls me aside and says, Marcus I want you to be aware of something. A studio only wants to take one risk at a time. Here you are, wanting to deconstruct as your first feature. You are the risk. So they wont want to make a movie with you plus let you deconstruct. I thought that was what you should expect from a first director. I said, You are absolutely right. So I left that production behind and accepted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the next week.

I accepted what I consider a masterpiece of deconstruction. When The Texas Chainsaw Massacre first came out, what was in the theatre was Doris Day/Rock Hudson type comedies. Thats pretty incredible. You cant do that today but you can look at that and figure out how to deconstruct a masterpiece of deconstruction. Out of that came the whole idea of putting something beautiful against that. Thats where the whole style came from. But its no question that there was a thought process involved. I wasnt like I know how to make things look pretty because Ive done enough Coke and diaper commercials. I was looking forward to doing this movie because I got to do everything I dont get to do in the pop world. The idea to do something gruesome but also magnetic was interesting to me.

DRE: Whats up with the way Jessica [Biel] is running around the entire movie and she never unties the knot in the front of her shirt?

MN: [laughs] I know. It was funny because my original take on it was that the actress I was looking for was the next Sissy Spacek. Then I realized that I was making a movie with Michael Bay [producing] so forget about that [laughs]. That was the one big concession. When I saw her I was originally reluctant because I never envisioned someone that was a cover girl or someone from the WB. I had never seen the show [7th Heaven] she was on which was of great help. Once I met her I felt she was a really old soul and she has a strong feminine quality I really like. Within the first five minutes of shooting the movie in this little van she stopped acting and started being. It was a great transformation and I think she did wonderfully.

DRE: How difficult is it to disturb your audience rather just go for a cheap scare?

MN: The cheap scares, or fake scares as we call them, you can do maybe three times in a movie. If you do it too much then people feel taken advantage of and cheated. The big scares are very theoretic. Its very much an alchemy. Sometimes the difference between it working and not working is a sound effect. You can see that you install all the buttons and you push them. Its all nuance, smoke and mirrors. You watch the audience or friends who are watching it and you stop watching the movie and you start watching them. Their body language, are they bored or look scared? You have to read the people that watch it. The end scene when he jumps out of the forest one more time was an alternate ending which I did not know the editor had switched in. I didnt expect it and I jumped out of my seat. It was the only time I got a scare out of my own movie. When I had that reaction I realized we had a good movie.

DRE: How do you reconcile the religious side of yourself with making horror movies?

MN: [laughs] Its kind of an interesting thing. I believe that good and bad are two sides of the same coin. I also believe in doing things in a playful way. Its a fun game. Theres a great story that maybe explains it. A Native American chief says to his son I have two wolves in my heart. One is called love and the other is called fear. They are constantly at battle. His son asks, Which one wins? The father replies, The one that I feed the most. That about sums it up.

DRE: Youve done so many music videos and now a movie. Do you feel you have a more personal story to tell in the vein of Fight Club?

MN: Yes, definitely and I am developing a whole bunch of them. In a way The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a personal story. I am very interested in rites of passage stories. Im also interested in striking a chord in peoples state of mind right now. Many people say that Tobe Hoopers original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a metaphor for the Vietnam War. He will be the first one to tell you that it wasnt.

What I know that it is a metaphor for is that it sums up the ultimate generational struggle. Now there is a strong generational struggle again. You didnt have that in the conformist 80s and 90s. Right now it is very strong again just as it was when kids were coming home in bodybags during the Vietnam War. A cruel society of parents sending their kids into senseless wars. You can never make a movie directly about something but subliminally it does strike a chord. In the movie all the aggressors are the older generation and its the kids who get caught up in it. Its kids from a one horse town trying to somehow make it and are being held back so you make a drivers license or you buy yourself a chainsaw.

DRE: Whats R. Lee Ermey like to work with? I know he likes to improvise.

MN: He improvised his whole part.

DRE: After R. Lee Ermey worked with David Fincher in Se7en, Fincher didnt want him to improvise. So Ermey doesnt like him too much.

MN: Thats interesting to know. Im a pretty permissive director because I like to be surprised. My favorite things are when things happen that I didnt plan. It becomes a visceral experience. One thing that was interesting is that not too much was planned. We only had three weeks of preproduction and 30 days of shooting. So you just have to see whats being brought to you because you work like a sieve retaining whats good and letting out whats not. In most cases youre just a sponge soaking it up. Its also a different movie than Se7en.

DRE: I read an older article about where you said when you see pierced noses, lips, cheeks and eyebrows, you think, "I'm the person responsible."

MN: [laughs] I won a couple of awards for a George Michael video [Killer/Papa Was A Rolling Stone], Back then it was a very new thing to pierce. Very few club kids had that done and we put it at the center of the video. Again a generation conflict blossoming, how much can you hate your parents to mutilate yourself like this?

DRE: So you dont have any piercings or tattoos?

MN: No [laughs]. I make movies like this instead.

DRE: I read that at age 15 you were illustrator. What were you like?

MN: If anything I was a cartoonist. I did storyboards and I worked for ad agencies. But my goal was to be a cartoonist so when I came to America on a Fulbright scholarship my big goal was to work for Mad Magazine. So my first interview was at Mad Magazine.

DRE: That must have been great.

MN: [Founder and Publisher of Mad Magazine] William Gaines was still around so I saw him walk through the office. That was my brush with celebrity. I actually met Don Martins copywriter and later hired him to be my copywriter.

DRE: I have heard that you may have mellowed over the years because I read about this Manifesto you put out a while ago.

MN: I have not mellowed [laughs]. A lot of the stuff about the manifesto has been grossly exaggerated. When it was written it was sort of a lampoon.

DRE: How is Frankenstein going?

MN: Very well. Its going to start shooting in May and were still casting right now. Its a very different take on it by way of a modern day retelling.

DRE: From what I heard its got a plot not unlike an X-Files type show.

MN: When I read it I thought it was much closer to a movie like Se7en rather than the gothic tale you would expect. Dean Koontz wrote it and he came up with the fantastic spiritual twist to the whole thing. The situation is that people are being killed and their bodies are found all over the city with parts missing. We realize slowly that the legend of Frankenstein and the reality are not that far apart. Victor Frankenstein realized that he could use the same technology that built the monster to keep himself alive through the ages. As he pops up we later realize that the monster he created is also still alive because when he was struck by lightning, God gave him immortality and a soul to essentially have him take care of business. Now in the modern world he is trying to reconnect with his creator. Over the years the creator turned more and more into a monster and the monster discovered his human side.